The following page reviews video captioning resources reviewed by the Information Technology Services (ITS) accessibility team.
S.U. Discounted Pricing
In order to make it easier for everyone to comply with Syracuse University's new ICT Accessibility policy, ITS has negotiated discounted pricing with Automatic Sync Technologies (AST) for providing captioning and transcription services.
Syracuse University and AST have worked together for over 12 years to offer high-quality, low-cost captioning services through integration with Ensemble Video. With CaptionSync, AST services can now be incorporated into the workflow for captioning a wide variety of video formats for other platforms, such as YouTube, Vimeo, and Blackboard. See the CaptionSync Services List for additional services.
See Captioning With AST/CaptionSync (*requires login) for more information and pricing if:
- You have a video in Ensemble that needs captions.
- You need live captioning for a Blackboard Collaborate session
- You have a video on your YouTube or Vimeo channel that needs captions.
- You have a video that will require audio description.
- You would like to have a YouTube or Vimeo video that you do NOT own captioned.
- You need live captioning for an event.
About Captioning
- Captions: Improving Access to Postsecondary Education, a video from the University of Washington
- Video Captioning: When is it required? (Video Captioning Decision Tree)
- Guidelines for Captioning
About Cart Services (Live Captioning)
- ASL Interpreting / CART Services
- /wiki/spaces/ITHELP/pages/159941351?
- How to use Blackboard Collaborate Real-time Captions (with AST/CaptionSync)
While third party speech-to-text products, such as Otter.ai, exist for live-captioning, ITS recommends that professional captioning be used whenever an accommodation is requested or whenever our policy requires that an event has live captioning. See Guidelines for CART and ASL Interpreting for more information. |
About Audio Description
- Audio description (sometimes referred to as Described Video) is provided by a trained describer that provides descriptions of the visual components of the video. Audio description makes video accessible to blind/visually-impaired persons who would otherwise miss out on information presented visually. This information is synchronized with the video, but provided in a separate sound track.
- For a full description and example of audio description, see the Penn State whitepaper titled An Introduction to Audio Description in Higher Education Video Content
Copyright considerations
- If you are captioning a video created by someone else, determine if your purpose qualifies for Fair Use
- Copyright Law vs Accessibility Law: Is it Fair Use to Caption Video you Don't Own? (3PlayMedia, April 9, 2015)
Captioning Ensemble Videos
Captioning Vendors
- AutomaticSync Technologies (preferred vendor)
- 3PlayMedia
- Audioeyes LLC
- Caption Advantage, LLC
- AMAC - Captioning and Described Media Services
- SpeakerText
Do-It-Yourself
- Captioning YouTube Videos (NCDAE)
- Free Tools for Captioning YouTube Videos (Terrill Thompson, University of Washington)
- Using YouTube, Express Scribe and other tools (Ken Petri, Ohio State University)
- How to Add Closed Captions & Subtitles to Facebook Videos
- Multi-media Universally Designed (The ACCESS Project, Colorado State University) includes Tutorials
- Find resources for creating your own Audio Descriptions at The Smith-Kettlewell Video Description Research and Development Center.
- videos showing best practices for creating your own video descriptions
- video description software
- standards and guidelines
- YouDescribe - submit videos for audio description or do it yourself